A little while back Scott MacVicarwrote some thank yous to some of the larger and corporate groups involved with PHP and enhancing it as much as they can, both on their own hardware and for the community in general. Unfortunately, there seems to be one company that doesn't want to pay nice - Apple.

So if you've ever tried to compile PHP on OS X, you'll most likely have problems using the default system libraries and in the end you'll use macports to install libxml and iconv. If you're not trying to compile your own versions of PHP and want to use a PECL extension then you'll find that the binary has had all the symbols stripped. Mid last year I tried to get some of these resolved, and filed a bug report with Apple but was informed these weren't bugs.

He goes on to talk about the reception he got from the Apple Developer Connection and the brush-off he seemed to get when he tried with the same questions a few months later.

What was essentially asked for was help to improve PHP on OS X, but this has fallen on deaf ears. Apple are happy to take PHP but don't seem as keen to contribute anything back to the project. Yes they are perfectly entitled to do this, PHP is open source after all. But is waiving a $499 charge too much to ask?